It’s my understanding that a female guard is to *always* be present just for these situations.
The options they gave this woman were to take her bra off in her car or in the building. Quite the option. So, she could have gone out to her car and removed her bra, walking back to the building with arms crossed so as to prevent a sway and embarrassment, or to remove her bra in the foyer as her husband shielded her. They chose the latter.
Again, a female guard could have easily cared for this situation w/o any undue harm.
I'm not really picking on you, but I wanted to read the entire thread before I flew off the handle responded.
In my county, the Sheriff's Office, by the state constitution, is responsible for security at courthouses (among other things). Our SO of 20 plus 60 plus or minus reserves had one woman deputy. Only one, despite our trying to be all diverse and correct and everything. (She couldn't shoot for toffee, either, but she was in most other respects an excellent officer in whom I had great confidence -- just let me do the shooting, please.)
Though the only court where people routinely had to go through a metal detector and/or be "scanned" was Juvenile and Domestic Relations (in other courts we only got paranoid for special occasions, like telephoned threats or really, really bad guys) there was no way we could always have a woman present.
You may sneer all you like at our balking at paper clips and nail clippers. Both can be used as weapons and as hand cuff jiggerers.
Please remember and understand that our staffing, equipment, and facilities are determined by the County Board of Supervisors. And we have to get it as right as we can everyday, and the bad guys get to keep on trying. If we get it wrong, people bleed. If they get it wrong, they can come back tomorrow having learned from their mistakes. We have found handcuff keys, paper clips and cigarette packages taped to the banister of the stairs by which we conduct people from the holding cells to the court room.
Currently, since the old Juvenile and Domestic Relations court building decided to try to fall down, we are in a "temporary" court house. Security downright STINKS, and it would be easy to pass stuff to a prisoner.
J&DR is the most routinely violent courtroom and the only one where the judges allow/require the prisoners to be brought in in full gear: cuffs, ankle shackles, belly chain. It is the only courtroom where, in living memory, a citizen blew through the metal detector, setting it off, and was tackled trying to enter the courtroom. In her purse was a .38 special snubby. She told us that on the top of her "To do" list for the day was "blow away ex-husband."
It's also the only place where I got a needle-stick going through somebody's purse (when I was a noob and didn't know how to search properly) and as a result had to pay for blood tests for HIV and hepatitis, was unable to give blood for a year, could not get up close and personal with my wife for a year, and could not receive the sacramental blood for a year unless I was the last person making his communion from that cup. No I did NOT sue the lady with needles in her bag, nor did she pay any penalty. But I was out hundreds of dollars because I was a reserve and the government wouldn't pay for injuries sustained in the line of duty.
My point is, if you are tasked with preventing injury inside the courtroom, with taking a bullet for the judge, if need be, if keeping prisoners safe from one another and from angry citizens not currently incarcerated, you develop a different attitude toward beeps in the metal detector and scanner.
Bean Counter: if I had said, "Go on through," I would have gotten my behind fired. It's easy to put the peons on the spot. A better course of action would be to go to the chief or the sheriff or other appropriate honcho.
Nevertheless, this seems to me to have been off the wall. If an underwire set the metal detector to yelping, I would scan the person until I knew where the yelp was coming from. From then it was a judgment call.
It kind of depends on the orders the guards were working under. If the boss had said that a metal detector alarm in every case meant people couldn't come in, well there you are. It's not that easy for a deputy who quit as a matter of principle to find other work.
Increasingly, LEOs and other security folks are being urged NOT to think. When a friend was sued, unsuccessfully but he still had to pay the lawyer, for crippling a bad guy who shot at him first, well, the moral of that story is, if you do your job in a bad situation you will either die or be impoverished.
So whom would you all like to serve as LEOs in these circumstances? Who do you think is going to take the job? If your idea of good citizenship is manfully to stride up to some poor slob and put HIM between the sheriff and yourself, and then pillory him publicly while not complaining effectively and persistently to your representatives, I don't think you can expect much improvement in the quality of Law Enforcement and Security.
Just think for a minute what it means that the Sheriff's Office NEEDED volunteers to get its constitutionally mandated work done. Then think about the relationship between what you expect from LEOs and what you pay them.